Nude Rabbis and Tales of Revenge

‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,’ Stories by Nathan Englander

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank,” the title story of Nathan Englander’s new collection, deliberately alludes to Raymond Carver’s classic tale “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” But while Mr. Englander’s narrative borrows Carver’s style and mise-en-scène (two couples sitting around a kitchen table), its conclusion and this volume as a whole underscore the authors’ very different views of the world and their very different approaches to fiction.

Whereas Carver’s stories focus on the difficulties of emotional connection and tend to feature isolated characters living in a present quite divorced from conventional social and political concerns, Mr. Englander’s people define themselves largely through their embrace — or rejection — of Jewish orthodoxy and tradition. Whereas Carver’s slender stories are grounded in the banalities and oddities of ordinary life, Mr. Englander’s tales use allegory and folkloric techniques (reminiscent of Isaac Bashevis Singer) to tackle the largest questions of morality and history.

Like his acclaimed 1999 debut collection, “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges,” this volume showcases Mr. Englander’s extraordinary gifts as a writer — and his liabilities. The story “Everything I Know About My Family on My Mother’s Side” demonstrates his new mastery of contemporary realism, recounting, in sharp, staccato takes, the efforts of a writer (named Nathan, no less) to piece together the secret stories of his own family’s past. In contrast, another tale about a writer, titled “The Reader,” devolves into a sort of hokey ghost story about the relationship between an author and his audience.

“Sister Hills” gives the reader an intimate understanding of the hopes and fears of Israeli settlers, walking the tightrope between fable and realism with unwavering authority and felt emotion, while “Free Fruit for Young Widows” begins as an exceptionally moving account of the sufferings endured by a young survivor of the Holocaust, only to tumble into fairy tale artifice.

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Nathan EnglanderCredit
Juliana Sohn

There is a dark undertow to many of these stories, reminding us of the human capacity for evil and appetite for revenge. The Holocaust casts a shadow over the lives of many of Mr. Englander’s characters — in the title story, the two couples play “the Anne Frank game,” wondering which of their friends would hide them in the event of another Holocaust — and in some cases its emotional fallout propels people to terrible acts.

“Camp Sundown” begins as a laugh-out-loud funny portrait of a summer camp for elderly retirees, but takes a more sinister turn when rumors begin to circulate that one of the campers was in fact a Nazi camp guard, and they lead to an out-and-out witch hunt.

As for “Free Fruit for Young Widows,” it recounts how a teenage survivor of the death camps, who’s seen his mother, his father, his sisters and grandparents all killed, returns home to find his childhood nurse, Fanushka, and her family occupying his parents’ house. After overhearing Fanushka’s plot to kill him (so as to keep custody of the house), he waits until everyone is asleep, then executes her entire family, including a 1 ½-year-old child (“because he did not know from mercy, and did not need to leave another of that family to grow to kill him at some future time”).

Even in cases where the main characters are friends or allies, grief or bad luck can lead to heartless behavior. “Sister Hills,” which traces the growth of a small Israeli settlement from a couple of shacks into a thriving Jerusalem suburb, depicts the emotionally fraught relationship between two neighbors: one, named Rena, loses her husband and her three sons to the war and unhappy accident; the other, named Yehudit, has nine children and lives a vibrant, satisfying life.

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Jake Guevara/The New York Times

When Yehudit’s daughter Aheret was a baby, on the verge of death from a high fever, Yehudit was so desperate she indulged an old superstition: to outsmart the Angel of Death, she “sold” Aheret to Rena for a pittance. Aheret survived, grew up to be a young woman, and now Rena, alone and bitter, decides to reclaim her, insisting that the girl forfeit her freedom and come to live with her as a caregiver.

At his best, Mr. Englander manages to delineate such extreme behavior with a combination of psychological insight, allegorical gravity and sometimes uproarious comedy. He can be as funny and outrageous as Philip Roth in describing the incongruities of modern life. The two couples in the title story, one secular and one Hasidic, sit around a kitchen table in Florida, smoking pot (filched from one woman’s son) rolled up in a paper tampon wrapper.

In another tale Mr. Englander captures the obsessive fear of wooden houses that consumes an elderly couple who live in an adobe house in Santa Fe and who, during a stay at a summer camp, take to wearing smoke alarms around their necks (on lanyards “woven specifically for this purpose in crafts”).

In several instances, however, the delicate narrative balance slips from Mr. Englander’s grasp. Either from an over-kneading of themes or from a willful melodramatic impulse, moral insight gives way to moralism, irony to O. Henry contrivance. “Peep Show” — in which a suburban husband’s visit to a Times Square nudie show turns into an encounter with a group of naked or scantily clad rabbis — is a heavy-handed portrait of a guilty conscience. And “How We Avenged the Blums” unravels into a predictable tale about Long Island kids getting revenge on a local anti-Semite.

It’s the title story and “Everything I Know About My Family” that point to Mr. Englander’s evolution as a writer, his ability to fuse humor and moral seriousness into a seamless narrative, to incorporate elliptical — yes, Carver-esque — techniques into his arsenal of talents to explore how faith and family (and the stories characters tell about faith and family) ineluctably shape an individual’s identity.

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ANNE FRANK

By Nathan Englander

207 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.95.

A version of this review appears in print on February 10, 2012, on page C27 of the New York edition with the headline: Nude Rabbis And Tales Of Revenge. Today's Paper|Subscribe